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#LDnursechat - the 'six Cs'

2 November, 2012

#LDnursechat discussed what the CNO’s vision for nursing means to LD nurses.

The build-up to this chat was electrifying, there seemed to be a massive buzz around the Twittersphere, and in the hours leading up to the chat I had a real sense of excitement, something epic was taking shape.

For the first thirty minutes the #nursecommunity tweeted together, about the ‘vision’.

Some were unsure of the terminology, a ‘vision’ may not always materialise, and something more concrete may be a better descriptor. Although the use of C-words to identify skills for nurses is not new (Roach 1992, 2002; Pusari 1998) it has been re-packaged to form a contemporary framework for nursing practice.

It was the fastest chat I’ve ever been involved with, and this made keeping up difficult at times. Overall, the comments posted were very corporate in nature, and there seemed to be overall agreement with the content of the six Cs. No-one challenged the statements within the document.

For the second part of the chat, #nurchat and #ldnursechat peeled off to look at student specific issues (#nurchat) and LD specific issues (#ldnursechat)

It was acknowledged that for the six Cs to work in LD nursing, some translation is needed, both to incorporate LD specific issues and also to open the six Cs to our colleagues in social care, private and voluntary sectors.

There was also some discussion about teaching the six Cs, and embedding the culture of the six Cs into future student nurse documentation.

Can you teach nurses to care? An important question, which highlighted that nurses can be taught to deliver planned care, but to actually care about the people they are delivering care to is a character trait, and therefore cannot be taught or developed.

How do we measure someone’s compassion? Can this be psychologically tested?

If there is no care, can there be compassion? If compassion is how we view the care we as nurses deliver, surely we have to care about what we do in order to have compassion for our patients? Too many questions and all without any clear cut answers - and while we can be taught about ethics, morals, care and compassion, our own character will process and interpret these differently, and different levels of practice will continue to exist throughout nursing as a profession.

As LD practitioners, do we have a duty to teach and support our patients to know what good care is? So many people with LD have low or no expectations of care, as they have historically received poor care, and are unaware what good care looks and feels like.

Are there missing Cs for LD nurses? We think there are, and the #ldnursechat contributors came up with a list of Cs which I feel need consideration and incorporation into the new vision, as challenging as that may prove.

So here they are, the missing Cs, in no particular order and each with their own measure of importance in striving for better care and outcomes for the LD community: Creativity, Choice, Collaboration, Continuity, Co-ordination, Commissioning and Compliance. In truth, each of these Cs is worthy of its own blog in order to further elaborate on why they made it into our list.

To summarise, there is much work to be done to translate and disseminate the six Cs amongst LD practitioners, and RNLDs need to be re-grouping to deliver on this. If any RNLDs reading this think that they’d be interested in driving the new vision forward, then please get in touch via @LDnursechat.

Sally Wilson

Read the transcript of this chat and see the forthcoming #ldnursechat schedule here.

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